The Firefly Witch Read Online Free

dark color offsetting her fire-red mane. She looked damn near panicked to death. “Hey,” I said sleepily, “what’s wrong?”
    She looked at me. This was something she could only do in the summer, as the rest of the time she was blind. But on summer nights, as long as fireflies were nearby, she could see, an ability that so far proved impossible to isolate or explain.
    “Thank the Goddess you’re here,” she cried, and ran into my arms. She trembled violently and gulped down great mouthfuls of air. I was completely nonplussed; we’d been dating since the previous fall, and in all that time I’d never seen her this scared. I shut the door and guided her to my couch, where I surreptitiously nudged a pillow over the duct-taped patch.
    “What is it?” I asked. “You want a Coke, or a beer, or--”
    “A beer!” she gasped. I quickly got her one, and she drank a huge swallow. Then she sat in silence, still trembling.
    “Isn’t a black dress hot in the summer?” I said, just to make conversation.
    “Yeah, it is,” she said, preoccupied, and whipped it off over her head. She sat there in nothing but black lace under-things, drinking. I could tell by the intense look on her face that she hadn’t even thought about it.
    Her near-nudity suddenly made me quiver. We’d been dating, like I said, for months, but we still hadn’t slept together. I know, I know, and she was even a practicing Pagan. But everything else--and I mean everything--was so perfect that I really didn’t mind. We were very passionate, and if the ultimate expression of that hadn’t happened yet, well, I could wait for the right time. But still, with her sitting there right in front of me, all soft and curvy and...I had a hard time concentrating.
    She suddenly realized what she’d done, looked up in surprise and kind of laughed. “Ohmigod, I’m sorry, Ry. I feel so comfortable with you, I just--”
    “No, no, don’t get dressed on my account. But what happened?”
    She pushed a mass of red curls out of her face. “Wow. Where do I start? I think the most amazing thing in the world happened. I think I met the world’s first ghost.”
    ***
    From the personal journal of Tanna Woicistikoviski :
     
    I am a witch. That one thing defines me. If, as Howard Hawks posits, you are what you do, then every aspect of my life passes through my status as a student of the Craft of the Wise.
    I am 25 years old, and a graduate student in parapsychology. This, too, is part of my craft, understanding the nature of the Invisible World and its effect on the Visible one.
    I am in love with a good, true, and strong man who doesn’t know he is any of those things. I will become part of his life, because I always have been. He doesn’t remember; I do, misty memories of warm embraces from earlier lives that I long to relive. But my Lady, who looks down with the face of the Moon, tells me to wait. So I wait.
    I have to write all this down, to state what should be obvious to me, so there will be a record. Tonight, my identity was taken from me. It was at my request, and with my permission, but with a totality that still terrifies me. I knew thoughts that weren’t mine, and feelings that tore open my heart as another’s had once been torn. I was released, returned to myself, but not without the sure knowledge that my greatest challenge lay before me: to give this spirit, possibly the first restless spirit of humanity, some kind of peace.
    And survive.
    ***
    As the beer took hold, she calmed down. “I-I had this...assignment from my teacher in the Craft, Lady Nighthawk. You’ve heard me talk about her, right? I had to find a sacred place, where spirits naturally congregate, and open myself t-to whomever might be there. I th-think she wanted me to learn how the spirits felt, since my path is to help them. But....” She shuddered and drank some more. “I found something more powerful than anything I’ve ever experienced in my life, a spirit as old as...as the world